To forum or not to forum...

BTW apparently we have an official Skullgirls Tumblr-blog:

The official forum is still coming, guys. Remember that the team is still small.

For the time being I feel that the SG community should just be content with what we have on here. Segregating ourselves like that isn’t going to get this game more recognition.

Strong examples! Wait, let me quickly skim through the respective SRK subboards

Let’s see:
VF: 3500 Posts, Decently frequent posting (but like, 2 posts per day)
MK: 14500 Posts, Forum is dead (extremely few recent posts, some from ~Summer 2012, most from Mid-2011)
Tekken (and this is 6+Tag): 9000 Posts, Forum is dead (around ~20 posts since Oct12)
Blazblue: 27000 Posts, Decently frequent posting (but like, 2 posts per day)
Persona: 7000 Posts, Looks active
KoF General: 40000 Posts, Looks active
KoF XIII: 9000 Posts, Looks active

SkullGirls: 87000 Posts, Extremely active (other than the Char subboards, which are still decently active, just not extremely)

Sooo… either we are much bigger than all of these, or maybe the community split sucks pretty bad and causes the respective SRK subboards to be dead.

How many of these games are known for getting fresh blood easily? VF has always been a closed off community, MK has always been a closed off community, BB pretty much is, Tekken isn’t but doesn’t really garner too much interest from 2d FG players either, Persona and KoF are accessible. How many SF players / random people / etc go and buy MK/VF? They’re pretty much as closed off as Smash is, even though they’re on current consoles.

If I’m interested in any of these games, I’m not gonna ask questions on SRK but ignore the dead subforum altogether.
If I’m mildly interested in any of these games, there’s a 50/50 chance that I will think “Oh, nobody posts here, game is dead” or that I google some other forum and then am probably too annoyed to make an account there.
If I’m a bit less than mildly interested, I will just ngaf and go back to other games where I have an easy time talking and getting info without a hassle.

As noted, this is for “competitive players” who have an account on SRK anyways. The artstyle/soundtrack/cosplay/whatever section possibly gets alienated by SRK, and as such a hub for these people might be a good idea. But the competitive center should stay here.
If this subforum was overbursting and we didn’t have any room, I’d understand the demand for a private forum, but this just isn’t the case - in fact, the char subboards are not really used and instead everyone just posts in 2-5 threads (Gameplay, Cupcakes, SkullBats, OTT, …)

Since there seems to be some risk involved with splitting communities and whatever else, why don’t we wait until we have at least 2 more characters and feel confident that nothing will happen to completely stop new content?

Because there will* never* be a time where there is no such risk, tbh.

Actually, there are some important ways that it could help, including gaining more recognition. My arguments to this end are in the previous thread (I’m too lazy to retype it all, lol).

I’ll say “New Forum” just cause SRK is acting like an ass lately. Lots of loads, bugs, glitches and downtimes that are killing our momentum.

Wouldn’t splitting too early be bad, though? If we at least know that we’ll be having content coming in, confident that the company wants to support the game over the long run, I think that’s the safer time. But, I’ll migrate wherever we go.

I still don’t see why there’s this urge to stay on SRK. What makes SRK so special that if we’re ONLY here, we’ll somehow get magical benefits of some sort?
SRK is limiting our growth at this point. Anyone on SRK that hasn’t already looked into SkullGirls by now probably isn’t going to start any time soon.
We should expand to attract more people.

True, but being a part of a large community also has its benefits. But again, moving forums doesn’t mean the SRK forum dies so IMO it’s a non-issue.

@Joe2187: Nope, it’s the same for everyone.

Is there some sort of trick to making SRK work properly on my browser? every now and then the site will just give random errors, fail to load, or just take to damn long to do anything. I’m using chrome btw.

and right now as I’m typing this reply, I get two error messages that failed to connect to server

frankly i think this alone is why we should have our own forum. So that it works

SRK is down for me at least 1/2 the time i try and go here

I’m not saying having our own forums is a bad idea. In fact, it’s a great idea. Newcomers and curious people are more likely to find our own forums than these ones or Dustloop’s.

What I don’t understand is that games that had a guaranteed spot at EVO all have their side forums, and are perfectly fine. While MK has a basically dead forum here, still going strong on Test Your Might AND The Realm of Mortal Kombat. TWO separate forums for a small community, and they’re still doing good.

But let’s still wait for official word, and by official I don’t mean a Facebook screenshot.

I don’t get the wait for Lab Zero to make the forum honestly.

It’s like they’re the developers and leaders of the community right now. It’s nice they’re involved but they’re not crutches or an excuse to not do something ourselves.

Yeah I don’t understand that at all. It reminds me of when people were asking Ravidrath if he’d keep recording Friday Night Fights, even though the game was being released and we’d be able to have our own match footage. It’s awesome that we’re being supported by an active developer, but relying on them to do our work for us makes our future less certain and their job harder.

This is a pretty ideal opportunity for us. The donation drive was a hit, and Squigly news should keep people’s eyes on Skullgirls even if they weren’t originally interested. We’ll (HOPEFULLY) be making great showings at UFGT9 and CEO, and who knows, we might even have some ‘official’ Evo exposure in some capacity. This week’s Skullbats had ~38 partipants, up from ~26 last week and ~22 the week prior. None of this screams “wait and see” to me!

Seems like most voted “Yes” so far

Start name suggestions?

I have no idea if its a good idea to have our own forum, but all of the character forums here could use a post-patch revamp. There’s a lot of lingering obsolete information

Best move on that front is to create new threads for SDE. Posters can get started on that.

Yeah, that’s something that needs to be remedied in general. I’m not a huge fan of the whole “someone makes a character thread, updates it for a few weeks, then stops being active” model we’ve got going. Would be better to have something that more people could contribute to so things stay up-to-date.

As for a name, Skullheart.com is the only one I’ve liked so far. Nice, clean, simple. shrug

I think a dedicated forum site to Skullgirls would be a great idea.